Yes Of Course They're Lying To Us About US Child Poverty - Why Do You Bother To Ask?

We often hear stories about how child poverty is really out of control in the United States. How it's worse than many other if not most countries and so on. Even that the child poverty rate is 20 or 25% of all children. None of these things are actually true. What is true is that the US is a richer country than most others and also a more unequal country than most others. If we measure poverty by inequality then we'll find that the US does badly in such a comparison. If we measure by actual standards of living then the US will do quite well. Similarly, if we measure US poverty before the things we do to alleviate poverty, as that 20-25% figure does, then the place will do badly. But then so will everywhere else, for they measure after the effects of the tax and benefits systems. And once we do that then the US child poverty rate falls to perhaps 2 or 3%. Pretty good for government work really.

The reason for retreading this argument once again is a piece at Salon. Which uses a particular UN report as its factual back up. A report which doesn't at all show what it is claimed it does.

None of these questions have a simple answer that everyone can agree on. But before we can talk about a better measure of poverty, we need to at least establish the criteria for what we’re calling poverty. Given the divisions over these questions, we may end up with several measures that describe different things. But that’s probably more useful than one measure built to gauge the poverty of the last century, and currently gauging not much.

How much poverty there is depends rather on what we're measuring as poverty. Which leads us to Salon:

A recent UNICEF report found that the United States ranked 34th on the list of 35 developed countries surveyed on the well-being of children.

That's the opening line and thing is it's simply not true. Not just that the US is 34th out of 35 in the well being of children, that's not even what the report does say.

The actually comes from The Conversation, and is written by someone who should know how these numbers work:

At NYU, Dr. Carten is former chair of the social welfare programs and policies area, and teaches in the social welfare policies and human behavior curricula sequences in the MSW program and social policy analysis in the doctoral program. Dr. Carten is also a consultant reviewer for the US Department of Juvenile Justice, Children’s Bureau of the Administration for Children and Families, helping to shape the national standards for child welfare outcomes.

The sort of person who shapes and guides US national policies that is. We might hope that she can actually read a UN report. Except it appears that she cannot. Here's that Unicef report:

That's the listing of child welfare. Seems an entirely sensible way of measuring it too. Here's a list of things we think kids should have. If they've not got one or three or whatever more of them then they are deprived in some manner. And obviously this list should be adjusted to be rich country only - there's hundreds of millions of poor children out there who have absolutely nothing.

OK, great. But note that the US isn't actually on this list at all. The US is however on this next list: